Profile:
George
Soros
By Neil Clark
New Statesman, 2nd June 2003
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George Soros is angry. In common with 90 per cent of the world's
population, the Man Who Broke the Bank of England has had enough of
President Bush and his foreign policy. In a recent article in the
Financial Times, Soros condemned the Bush administration's policies
on Iraq as "fundamentally wrong" - based as they were on a "false
ideology that US might gave it the right to impose its will on the
world".
Wow! Has one of the world's richest men - the archetypal amoral
capitalist who made billions out of the Far Eastern currency crash of
1997 and who last year was fined for insider trading by a court in
France - seen the light in his old age? (He is 72.) Should we pop the
champagne corks and toast his conversion?
Not before asking what really motivates him. Soros likes to portray
himself as an outsider, an independent-minded Hungarian emigre and
philosopher-pundit who stands detached from the US
military-industrial complex. But take a look at the board members of
the NGOs he organises and finances. At Human Rights Watch, for
example, there is Morton Abramowitz, US assistant secretary of state
for intelligence and research from 1985-89, and now a fellow at the
interventionist Council on Foreign Relations; ex-ambassador Warren
Zimmerman (whose spell in Yugoslavia coincided with the break-up of
that country); and Paul Goble, director of communications at the
CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which Soros also funds).
Soros's International Crisis Group boasts such "independent"
luminaries as the former national security advisers Zbigniew
Brzezinski and Richard Allen, as well as General Wesley Clark, once
Nato supreme allied commander for Europe. The group's vice-chairman
is the former congressman Stephen Solarz, once described as "the
Israel lobby's chief legislative tactician on Capitol Hill" and a
signatory, along with the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz,
to a notorious letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for a
"comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down
Saddam and his regime".
Take a look also at Soros's business partners. At the Carlyle Group,
where he has invested more than, they include the former secretary of
state James Baker and the erstwhile defence secretary Frank Carlucci,
George Bush Sr and, until recently, the estranged relatives of Osama
Bin Laden. Carlyle, one of the world's largest private equity funds,
makes most of its money from its work as a defence contractor.
Soros may not, as some have suggested, be a fully paid-up CIA agent.
But that his companies and NGOs are closely wrapped up in US
expansionism cannot seriously be doubted.
So why is he so upset with Bush? The answer is simple. Soros is angry
not with Bush's aims - of extending Pax Americana and making the
world safe for global capitalists like himself - but with the crass
and blundering way Bush is going about it. By making US ambitions so
clear, the Bush gang has committed the cardinal sin of giving the
game away. For years, Soros and his NGOs have gone about their work
extending the boundaries of the "free world" so skilfully that hardly
anyone noticed. Now a Texan redneck and a gang of overzealous
neo-cons have blown it.
As a cultivated and educated man (a degree in philosophy from the
London School of Economics, honorary degrees from the Universities of
Oxford, Yale, Bologna and Budapest), Soros knows too well that
empires perish when they overstep the mark and provoke the formation
of counter-alliances. He understands that the Clintonian approach of
multilateralism - whereby the US cajoles or bribes but never does
anything so crude as to threaten - is the only one that will allow
the empire to endure. Bush's policies have led to a divided Europe,
Nato in disarray, the genesis of a new Franco-German-Russian alliance
and the first meaningful steps towards Arab unity since Nasser.
Soros knows a better way - armed with a few billion dollars, a
handful of NGOs and a nod and a wink from the US State Department, it
is perfectly possible to topple foreign governments that are bad for
business, seize a country's assets, and even to get thanked for your
benevolence afterwards. Soros has done it.
The conventional view, shared by many on the left, is that socialism
collapsed in eastern Europe because of its systemic weaknesses and
the political elite's failure to build popular support. That may be
partly true, but Soros's role was crucial. From 1979, he distributed
a year to dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter
77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In
1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and
pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent
media. Ostensibly aimed at building up a "civil society", these
initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures
and pave the way for eastern Europe's eventual colonisation by global
capital. Soros now claims, with characteristic immodesty, that he was
responsible for the "Americanisation" of eastern Europe.
The Yugoslavs remained stubbornly resistant and repeatedly returned
Slobodan Milosevic's unreformed Socialist Party to government. Soros
was equal to the challenge. From 1991, his Open Society Institute
channelled more than to the coffers of the anti-Milosevic opposition,
funding political parties, publishing houses and "independent" media
such as Radio B92, the plucky little student radio station of western
mythology which was in reality bankrolled by one of the world's
richest men on behalf of the world's most powerful nation. With Slobo
finally toppled in 2000 in a coup d'etat financed, planned and
executed in Washington, all that was left was to cart the ex-Yugoslav
leader to the Hague tribunal, co-financed by Soros along with those
other custodians of human rights Time Warner Corporation and Disney.
He faced charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide,
based in the main on the largely anecdotal evidence of (you've
guessed it) Human Rights Watch.
Soros stresses his belief in the "open society" propounded by the
philosopher Karl Popper, who taught him at the LSE in the early
1950s. Soros's definition of an "open society" - "an imperfect
society that holds itself open to improvement" - sounds reasonable
enough; few lovers of genuine liberty would take issue with its
central tenet that "the open society is a more sophisticated form of
social organisation than a totalitarian one". But Soros's "open
societies" don't tend to be all that open in practice.
Since the fall of Milosevic, Serbia, under the auspices of
Soros-backed "reformers", has become less, not more, free. The
recently lifted state of emergency saw more than 4,000 people
arrested, many of them without charge, political parties threatened
with bans, and critical newspapers closed down. It was condemned by
the UN Commission on Human Rights and the British Helsinki Group. But
there was not a murmur from the Open Society Institute or from Soros
himself. In fairness, Soros has been far more critical of his former
protege Leonid Kuchma, president of the Ukraine, a country described
by the former intelligence officer Mykola Melnychenko as "one big
protection racket", and now possibly the most repressive police state
in Europe.
But generally the sad conclusion is that for all his liberal quoting
of Popper, Soros deems a society "open" not if it respects human
rights and basic freedoms, but if it is "open" for him and his
associates to make money. And, indeed, Soros has made money in every
country he has helped to prise "open". In Kosovo, for example, he has
invested in an attempt to gain control of the Trepca mine complex,
where there are vast reserves of gold, silver, lead and other
minerals estimated to be worth in the region of . He thus copied a
pattern he has deployed to great effect over the whole of eastern
Europe: of advocating "shock therapy" and "economic reform", then
swooping in with his associates to buy valuable state assets at
knock-down prices.
More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soros is the
uncrowned king of eastern Europe. His Central European University,
with campuses in Budapest, Warsaw and Prague and exchange programmes
in the US, unashamedly propagates the ethos of neoliberal capitalism
and clones the next pro-American generation of political leaders in
the region. With his financial stranglehold over political parties,
business, educational institutions and the arts, criticism of Soros
in mainstream eastern European media is hard to find. Hagiography is
not. The Budapest Sun reported in February how he had been made an
honorary citizen of Budapest by the mayor, Gabor Demszky. "Few people
have done to Budapest what George Soros has," gushed Demszky, saying
that the billionaire had contributed to "structural and mental
changes in the capital city and Hungary itself". The mayor failed to
add that Soros is also a benefactor of Demszky's own party, the Free
Democrats, which, governing with "reform" communists, has pursued the
classic Soros agenda of privatisation and economic liberalisation -
leading to a widening gap between rich and poor.
The Soros strategy for extending Pax Americana differs from the Bush
model, particularly in its subtlety. But it is just as ambitious and
just as deadly. Left-liberals, admiring his support for some of their
favourite issues such as gay rights and the legalisation of soft
drugs, let him off lightly.
Asked about the havoc his currency speculation caused to Far Eastern
economies in the crash of 1997, Soros replied: "As a market
participant, I don't need to be concerned with the consequences of my
actions." Strange words from a man who likes to be regarded as the
saviour of civil society and who rails in print against "market
fundamentalism".
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the
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